When you brew Japanese Sencha, there is a good chance the leaves come from Yabukita: according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, it holds the largest cultivated area share among all tea cultivars in Japan, making it the backbone of the country's tea industry. That cultivar was the life's work of a self-taught farmer from Shizuoka.
Sugiyama Hikosaburo devoted his entire life to cultivar development in tea. In his hometown of Shizuoka, he is remembered as "Hikosaburo Okina" — the elder — and respected to this day, long after his death.
Who Was Sugiyama Hikosaburo?
Hikosaburo Sugiyama was born in 1857 in Udo Village, Abe County, in what is now Shizuoka City. He left the family sake brewery and herbal medicine business to his younger brother and turned instead to farming.
The timing was pivotal. Around the year of his birth, Japan concluded the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States. Tea became the country's second largest export after raw silk — a flourishing, fast-moving industry. Hikosaburo entered this field without a teacher, learning through observation and trial alone.
As the tea industry expanded rapidly, he took on the role of secretary for the local tea industry association, helping curb the flood of substandard tea on the market. Yet he was unsatisfied. He later recalled feeling ashamed that he himself had not yet produced truly excellent tea — a candid admission that speaks to his character.
After years of painstaking work, he succeeded in breeding "Yabukita." He died in 1941 at the age of 83, never having seen it spread across Japan.
Today, a monument to his achievements stands in Shizuoka City, and the original "Yabukita" tree has been designated a natural monument by Shizuoka Prefecture. There is also the "Sugiyama Hikosaburo Award," presented to those who have made outstanding contributions to the tea industry.
The Achievements of Sugiyama Hikosaburo
The Beginning of Cultivar Breeding
Hikosaburo cleared his own land and built a tea plantation largely without formal instruction. He studied under officials of the Kannou Bureau — the Ministry of the Interior's agricultural promotion division — and learned the craft of tea-making from a distant relative, the tea master Yamada Bunsuke, who held a guiding principle: "to make good tea, you need good tea leaves."
Through careful observation, Hikosaburo noticed two things that seem obvious now but were not widely recognized at the time: some tea plants grew faster than others, and the quality of the leaf differed meaningfully depending on the variety.
In the tea gardens of his era, it was completely normal to find dozens of different cultivars mixed together in a single field, producing leaves of wildly inconsistent quality. Recognizing that the plant itself determined the tea's potential was, in context, a genuine breakthrough — and the first step toward systematic cultivar improvement.
Development of Yabukita
Convinced that a stable supply of excellent tea required excellent plants, Hikosaburo threw himself into cultivar improvement. He had no academic framework for what he was doing. It was pure trial and error, year after year.
At the time, people did not understand his work. They called him eccentric. The effort he was making — what we now recognize as systematic cultivar improvement — had no name and no precedent in the local tea world.
From around his mid-thirties, he developed new varieties steadily. Among them, he selected a particularly promising tea tree growing on the north side of a thicket and named it "Yabukita" — meaning "north of the grove." The tree on the south side became "Yabuminami." Yabukita proved to be disease-resistant, easy to cultivate, and consistent in producing leaves with a clean, well-balanced flavor.
Its quality was recognized after it was officially introduced. But the intervening years of war meant Yabukita did not spread throughout Japan until fourteen years after Hikosaburo's death.
Dedicated to the Local Tea Industry
Hikosaburo's contributions went beyond breeding a single cultivar.
In his fifties, he finally found a powerful supporter: Kahei Otani, chairman of the Central Chamber of Tea Industry. Together they pursued a cultivar improvement project at a dedicated test site. When Otani stepped down as chairman, institutional support evaporated. Hikosaburo was forced to give up the test site entirely.
He was 77 years old. He did not stop.
He purchased his own tea plantation and continued his research there. He brought in young men from the neighborhood and shared everything he had learned — every technique, every insight from decades of breeding work — so the knowledge would survive him. He freely taught neighboring farmers, was quick to adopt new machinery, and worked on local river improvement and tea garden infrastructure. This sustained generosity is why his hometown still calls him "Hikosaburo Okina" to this day.
Three Episodes That Reveal His Passion
The Man Called "a Weasel"
To find good tea plants, Hikosaburo wandered tea fields day and night, sometimes crossing into other people's land. He would crouch low and move through the rows of bushes so intently that neighbors mocked him as a "weasel." He paid them no attention.
When he found a tree that looked promising, he chewed the raw leaves in the field to assess them. The habit wore down his front teeth. The missing teeth stayed with him for the rest of his life — a small, indelible record of the thousands of plants he had examined.
He put everything into the search for the ideal cultivar — time, health, money, teeth.
Travel Anywhere for Tea
Hikosaburo's drive to find good plant stock had no geographical limit.
In an era when transportation was unreliable and slow, he traveled across Japan and as far as Korea in search of promising tea plants. He always packed sphagnum moss to keep cuttings hydrated on the way back. When he found a specimen he wanted to bring back, he sometimes pressed branches into the cut ends of vegetables to keep them alive long enough to make it home.
Twenty Years of Work, Turned to Firewood
When Hikosaburo lost his supporters and was forced to surrender the test site, he was 77. Every tea tree he had raised there — more than twenty years of careful work — was uprooted and used as firewood.
He watched that happen. Then he bought new land and started again.
At 77, after losing everything he had grown, Hikosaburo's response was not grief or withdrawal. It was to continue. That kind of persistence — spending private money, training young farmers, building something he might not live to see — is what shaped Yabukita's eventual dominance.
What made Yabukita so enduring is that it strikes a rare balance: a clean, grassy brightness up front, a gentle sweetness in the mid-palate, and just enough astringency to keep things lively. It grows reliably, resists cold, and processes well for both standard and deep-steamed Sencha. Read more about the cultivar he discovered in our Yabukita guide.
Taste His Legacy
Much of the Sencha we carry comes from Yabukita plants — a living continuation of what Hikosaburo spent his life building. That clean, grassy brightness in the cup connects, through successive generations of cultivated plants, back to the one he found north of a grove in Shizuoka. Browse our green tea collection and you are tasting his legacy.